


All Summer In His Eyes

by SpencerMalloy



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: AU, HoO - Freeform, M/M, Nico di Angelo/Will Solace - Freeform, PJO, Roald Dahl - Freeform, all summer in a day, please leave a comment i worked hard on this, solangelo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-24 01:03:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13800108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpencerMalloy/pseuds/SpencerMalloy
Summary: This is a sort of crossover fic I wrote based in the universe of Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer In A Day.' Nico and Will live on a planet where the sun only comes once a decade, but Nico came from Earth. He remembers the sun and the last time it shone overhead he was cheated out of it.(I also have this posted onto my account on Wattpad, I didn't steal it)





	All Summer In His Eyes

"Ready?"

"Ready."

"Now?"

"Soon."

"Do the scientists really know, Will? Will it happen today?"

"Look and see for yourself!"

Nico pressed himself to the window like a weed buried too long in the undergrowth, desperate for even a shred of the light it was so deprived.

It rained.

The rain had not stopped for seven years. The skies a perpetual gray sheet of clouds too smudged to differentiate from one another, the oceans textured by the water that fell and flooded them, and the jungles surrounding covering their planet being crushed under the storms in an ongoing cycle of destruction and renewal. The endless pattering pounding of rain forever washed over the planet Venus, and in turn the civilization of the rocket men and women who had so long ago come to the raining world to build a life and live it out here. In turn the rain washed over their children.

"Will! It's stopping!"

"Yes, yes, I see it!"

Nico and Will stood away from their peers, from the others who waited anxiously to see another glimpse of the brilliant gleaming yellow that they had been teased with so many years ago. They stood away from them for an obvious reason. A reason that everyone, it seemed, in their small community, had caught wind of. Nico still had dreams about it. They were more nightmares, really.

Sometimes at night, Will and the others would hear him stir. Tossing and turning in his bed, tangled in the sheets and thrashing. Crying so hard he would often wake himself up, at least before Will made it his personal job to get Nico up before that happened. This, unintentionally but not unwelcomed, came with learning what exactly happened. Nico's nightmare was a memory. Warped into gray and black and white, and sometimes exaggerated—but always centered on the same traumatic moment in his life.

When he was nine, the day the sun last revealed itself, the children in their class had caught him up and shoved him and stuffed him into a closet. He screamed until his voice was gone, wasted on deaf ears. He bruised himself black and blue throwing himself against a door that wouldn't budge. He was not let out until the two hour period of light and warmth had passed.

Yesterday there had been no lessons of the sun, nor any songs or stories—not officially, not from the teachers; they were all much too old to be treated like starlings, of course. But floating around the classroom there were recounts of the sun's blazing fire-colored rays and the darkened skin that appeared after their brief meeting. The one story that was not repeated was the only one Nico or Will cared about, the one they remembered almost every day. No one from Nico's original class had forgotten, but all had forgiven themselves for what they did as children a long time ago. If they didn't, they were too ashamed to bring any more attention to the act than Nico's nightmares already did.

"Do you still remember what it looked like last?" Nico asked, but the question was near futile. He had asked it almost every day this year, comparing Will's recent memories to his faded ones. He was always surprised to find they matched in complete harmony.

Will grinned ear to ear. "Large, and bright. It hurt my eyes."

"It does that."

"And it was the most vibrant yellow—it brightened all the colors it touched."

Nico closed his eyes, remembering.

"And it was warm." Will kept a close eye on the window. The rain was ceasing and he needed to make sure Nico didn't miss it again.

Nico was colorless. He was grayer than the pictures in an old photo album, and everything on him either seemed to be black or white. His skin was blanched of what Will had taken to be an olive color, from pictures hung in his home. His hair had darkened without the sun and what used to be a lovely dark chocolate brown was now a stark black. He never dressed in color, all of his clothes were that of mourning. Sometimes, if the light of the sunlamps caught him just right, Will could see a dark highlight of brown in his hair. Arguably, though, the most depressing part of the changes that had taken place since Nico and his family had come to Venus, were in his eyes. In the picture of Nico and his sisters back on Earth, Nico's eyes were every color. The green reflected from the grass and the blue from the sky, the brown and gold from his sisters' hair and the purple of his younger sister's shirt. Every time Will saw the picture he could find a new color in Nico's half squinted eyes. He had been looking at the sun, his eyes crinkled in the corners and slightly shut away from the blinding light. Now Nico's eyes were the color of broken glass, a muddy gray, and if Will was lucky enough to catch any color reflecting in his irises it was painfully muted.

"What do you see?" Will whispered.

A smile tugged at the corners of Nico's mouth. In all the hundreds of days that they'd known each other, he'd never seen Nico's smile cover his whole face. Sometimes his mouth would make the whole shape, and sometimes only his eyes would twinkle with delight, but very rarely would those two things happen at the same time and never did Nico let himself show a toothy grin. That was okay. Will smiled enough for the both of them. Nico didn't need to smile for Will to know he was happy most days.

"A sunset. When the sun would dip so low in the sky it would turn the clouds pink and orange and yellow. And then it would disappear."

"But it always came back out again, right?" Will asked, even though he knew the answer.

"Oh, yes. Every morning. Warmth would pile in through the windows of my bedroom and sometimes I would be lucky enough to see the sunrise."

"Sunrise?" Will prodded lightheartedly. He had been told these things a million times, it seemed, but he never ceased to love listening. "What are those like?"

Nico's eyes opened. "Lovely. Like a sunset, but...lighter. Because the sun is phasing from black to purple back to cerulean—and the clouds change color then, too. Not for long, but if you're lucky you can catch it."

"But isn't that like a sunset, except it's bleeding from blue to purple to black instead of the other way around?" He played along.

"No—at sunset, the sky turns a million warm colors. I don't know how. Surely it should be brown from the mixture, but it comes out from the yellow of your hair to the pink in your cheeks and it's beautiful."

Warm splotches splattered Will's neck and face and his ears were burning. He'd never gotten that answer before.

"It's stopped!" Someone said. Everyone started pushing for the doors that lead outside, but Will grabbed Nico's wrist before he could run out and be trampled. His eyes were scared for a moment.

"Will..."

"It'll be half an hour before we'd get out that way," Will said, grabbing the window's latch. He pulled it open. "It's only the first floor."

Will had expected it to take more coaxing, so he was astounded when he blinked and Nico was half way out the window.

"Hurry up!" He yelled once out.

Will landed with a thump in the mud. When he opened his eyes, his thigh smarting from the drop, the pain was suddenly ignored. Nico grabbed his hand, his other covering Will's eyes.

"Come on," he said. "We'll look together."

He helped Will to his feet and they stumbled a couple steps forward until they felt the tarmac of the track underneath them instead of sloshy ground.

"Ready?"

"Ready."

"Now?"

"Go."

Nico pulled away his hand and Will's vision was flooded with blue. Deep, but not the dark of the oceans and not nearly as gray or green—this was all blue. Something pricked at the corner of his eye and he followed it, finding himself gazing up at the sun. He had seen it only once before that he could remember, and it was so much more spectacular now.

"Wow," Nico sighed. Will felt the same, but not because of the yellow light that was now enveloping them. Nico's mouth was split into a grin, breathless and slightly agape. Will had never seen that smile outside of photographs.

Nico was too preoccupied to notice his staring, but shortly after that they heard everyone pooling out of the school. He laced his fingers through Nico's and pulled him far away from the ever-growing crowd, watching Nico as Nico watched the sky.

Apart from the shuffling of feet and absentminded gasps, it was quiet. Complete silence washed over them—and then someone let out a cheer. Cries of laughter and the pounding sound of running was almost too loud for thinking, but Will wouldn't have traded it. Nico was smiling. Genuinely, honestly, whole-heartedly smiling. His eyes were scrunched up, giving him creases around his nose as he stared at the sky. His irises were catching every ounce of dull color around them and magnifying them into something stunning, just like Nico himself, with his skin rosy and his hair brown. Albeit a dark brown, a brown everyone else would have passed for black—his hair was brown again. It must have been all the time.

When Nico could finally drag his gaze away from the sight in the sky, his eyes landed on Will. They widened, along with his grin, if that was even possible—and he pushed back on Will's chest lightly before taking off.

"You're it!" He yelled back to him.

They were reduced to children, playing games in the sunshine and running just for the pleasure of running. There were shouts from teachers that they not stray too far so as not to get stranded, but they were barely heard. This newfound warmth was too euphoric for them to admit that the cold would ever leech itself back into their bodies.

Will was in the middle of a sprint after Nico when he felt something large and wet plop onto his head and sink down to his scalp. He was unable to say anything, but brought his hand to his mouth to stifle a cry. It hadn't been two hours already, it can't have been—had it? Nico didn't get far before he realized Will was no longer following him.

Raindrops, big and fat, were falling again on the tarmac. It wasn't much yet, but it was there. The whole atmosphere turned anxious and melancholy. No one wanted this to end.

Will's eyes welled up like the sky and tears began to leak out of the corners of his eyes.

"What's wrong?"

"I-I don't want this to end," Will choked.

Nico's smile returned to its normal size, but the bottom of his front row of teeth still peeked out slightly. "Me either."

"I don't want you not to smile anymore, Nico."

Nico stepped closer to him and took Will's hands in his own. "Did you know your eyes are blue?" He asked, more rain splashing down around them.

Will nodded, tears still sliding down his face accompanied by periodic raindrops.

"I needed to be sure, I needed a comparison—but I shouldn't have. I remembered the sky perfectly. They're the exact color of your eyes. Even when it's raining. And when the light catches them—it's like the light is coming from inside of your eyes, Will."

Will's throat was sore from holding back sobs. "What?"

"And your hair really is the same color, too. Golden and soft. You're warm and inviting and—"

"Everyone back inside!" A teacher yelled.

"And," Nico continued anyway, staring up at Will with his broken glass eyes that were slowly turning back to a dull gray, but retaining all of the twinkle that Will rarely got to see. "Your lips and your cheeks—pink and full. And you smile so much—Will, you're beautiful. You're my Summer," he said, wiping Will's cheeks even though it was a futile effort in the steady drizzle that had returned.

"Nico..."

"I want you to come back to Earth with me. Come back to Earth with me and we can the sun almost every day—did you know in some places, like the tropics of Alaska, they have six months of sunlight?"

"Nico, I—"

"You can see the clouds turn pink and the sky blend into beautiful reds and oranges—we can get up early and greet the sun. We can have more than a couple hours every decade—please don't say no, Will," Nico pleaded, wrapping his arms around Will, pressing his face into his chest and holding on tightly to the last bit of warmth on the planet that was held deep inside the boy in front of him with hair like the sun and eyes like the sky.

The rain was beating down around them now, and Will was distantly aware of a teacher shouting for them to come inside. He didn't realize how much he truly loved holding Nico after his nightmares until now, or that it was simply because he loved holding Nico. He loved being held by Nico. He loved Nico.

Will squeezed Nico to him even tighter and rested his chin on the top of Nico's wet hair, the rain falling in buckets around them now. He almost had to shout for Nico to hear him over it.

"Of course, Sunshine."


End file.
